DraftKings CFO Alan Ellingson has said the operator left behind “a whole graveyard of companies” in the fight for sports betting supremacy across the US.
Speaking during the Gabelli Sports & Media Symposium yesterday, 4 June, Ellingson praised the Boston-headquartered operator’s resilience, as many firms ended up dropping out of the market after an initial surge in operators vying for a slice of the pie.
He said: “I remember when sportsbook first launched in some of these states, especially the states that offered unlimited licences, you had 30 to 50 operators that were showing up and trying to compete for the same people.
“The easiest way to compete is on promotional intensity and offers to new users, but that isn’t always profitable.
“At the end of the day, product wins out, companies need to turn around and they need to get to a place where they’re making the right decision for the bottom line. At that point, it comes down to who can do it the best, who follows the data, who builds the best product.
“I’m very proud to say we’re down to two operators that have about 80% of the market right now, and they’re competing on product, technology and the ability to create a breadth of markets that customers want, and not just competing on promotional intensity.
“There’s a whole graveyard of companies who thought they could win sportsbook eight years ago. Now the best has risen to the top and I’m very proud DraftKings has been able to be one of those operators.”
A slew of European operators left the US market in 2024, including the likes of Super Group, evoke, Kindred Group (prior to being acquired by FDJ United), Betfred and Tipico.
Various media-led brands such as MaximBet, and PENN Entertainment’s attempts with Barstool Sports and then ESPN, also failed to mount significant challenges.
Meanwhile, DraftKings is second only to FanDuel when it comes to betting and gaming market share across the US.
The firm, which sat second in EGR’s US Power Rankings for 2026, generated revenue of $6.1bn for 2025, up 27% year on year.
The operator also ventured into the ever-growing prediction markets space towards the end of 2025, launching its DraftKings Predictions product in December.
This followed the acquisition of Railbird in October, with the exchange purchased with the explicit goal of launching a prediction markets offering.
Ellingson shed further light on the company’s plans for its prediction markets offering.
He added: “Prediction markets have not fully developed. They don’t have the same depth of market the sportsbook app does, but that difference gets narrower every single day. This week we launched the second phase of our prediction markets product, which in my mind is significantly better than what we had before.
“As far as the economics of the prediction market goes, there are more players engaged in the supply chain whohave to split and share those economics between them. Our objective long term is to have all the pieces of the chain of the vertical integration to be able to capture all of the economics.
“We have almost all the pieces right now. We recently did an acquisition of a company called Railbird, and we currently have partnerships for some of the other pieces. We have the customers on the frontend, and we have the expertise on the backend to create the market. We own the exchange and we believe we can capture all the economics long term.”
Although the offering currently focuses on sports event contracts, Ellingson suggested the company could potentially venture into financial trading in the future, and such a move was “not off the table”.
Ellingson told Morning Brew’s After Earnings podcast: “We are a for-money entertainment company, there is something thematic about how we engage with customers, and we’ll see how that evolves.
“But we’re going to focus on what we’re good at, which is sports.”
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Alan Ellingson says “the best has risen to the top” as other operators have dropped out of the market following the competitive rush post-PASPA in 2018
The post DraftKings CFO: There’s “a whole graveyard of companies” who thought they could win US sportsbook battle first appeared on EGR Intel.